Austria Vote May Put Far-Right Party in Thick of Things

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Published: October 3, 1999

VIENNA, Oct. 2—
Can a politician so tanned that he's known as the Hero of the Solarium, so narcissistic that he's posed in everything from lederhosen to silver togas to near nudity, and so controversial that his opponents openly call him a crypto-Nazi actually beat this conservative country's red-and-black coalition Government until it's black-and-blue?

That question will be answered on Sunday, when Austria's voters choose between the Social Democrats (the reds), the conservative business-and-church-oriented People's Party (black), and the newly powerful right-wing Freedom Party (color code: blue) led by Jorg Haider. (The Green Party and the ''yellow'' Liberal Forum are not expected to do well enough to tempt pundits with a ''traffic-light government.'')

Pollsters predict that the reds will hang on to their No. 1 spot with about 35 percent of the vote, but indicate that Mr. Haider's blues are expected for the first time to outstrip the black column, 27 percent to 25 percent. If the People's Party slips to third place for the first time since 1945, its leader says he will drop out of the longstanding red-black coalition to rebuild his demoralized forces. Color schemes aside, that leaves Mr. Haider -- whose party had a mere 5 percent when he took it over in 1986 -- as a potential kingmaker.

The idea horrifies the Austrian political establishment. After all, the reds and blacks only got together in their highly unusual left-right coalition in 1986 in order to keep Mr. Haider from power. And their partnership has lasted mostly on the shared perception that it was necessary to keep things that way. Vienna's liberals, who are prominent in the press and academia, also shudder at the prospect of Mr. Haider gaining even more influence in Austrian politics.

The vision reverberates, too, beyond Austria's borders: Gunter Grass, Germany's new Nobel laureate for literature, celebrated the honor on Friday morning by giving the early morning weather forecast on German state television. He predicted sunshine in the south on Sunday, and then directly urged Austrians -- many of whom watch German television -- to vote against Mr. Haider, widely characterized as the head of Europe's largest far-right party.

The terms used to describe Mr. Haider would barely be utterable in Germany: his parents' time in the Hitler Youth is repeatedly brought up; his takeover of the Freedom Party and ousting of its liberal wing is called a ''putsch,'' the corps of handsome young men around him is likened to a Praetorian Guard or 1930's street thugs. Dozens of protesters at a Haider rally on Friday night chanted ''Nazis, out!''

Mr. Haider has not helped. In 1991, he snapped at a Socialist rival in his home province of Carinthia: ''They had a sound employment policy in the Third Reich, which is more than your Government in Vienna has managed,'' and was immediately accused of endorsing slave labor and forced to resign as the province's governor, an office he regained after a comeback in provincial elections last fall.

In 1996, Mr. Haider spoke to a reunion that included former Waffen SS men, calling them ''decent people with character who stuck to their belief through the strongest headwinds.'' The Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles displays Mr. Haider's picture in its ''Contemporary Demagogues'' section, alongside the former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, David Duke of Louisiana and the French rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen.

But a Haider party leader, Peter Sichrovsky, who is Jewish, bristles at ''Nazi'' cracks. ''It's a stupid comparison, and I don't accept it,'' he said. ''I will accept any criticism of our immigration policy, but I refuse dialogue with anyone comparing us to mass murderers. The Green Party in Rome has an anti-Gypsy policy and no one compares them to Mussolini.'' Mr. Haider, he said, has visited Israel and took his daughters through the Holocaust Museum in Washington shortly after it opened.

The party does want all immigration halted, but insists that jobs, not skin color, is the issue. ''Our strongest supporter is the Turkish guy who's been here 10 years cleaning floors and is scared a guy from the ex-Yugoslavia will take his job for half the money,'' Mr. Sichrovsky said.

The party also has ideas for which Americans know the roots: it wants a 23 percent flat tax and calls its platform Contract With Austria. But other platform planks are, in American terms, classic tax-and-spend liberalism: Mr. Haider promises $400 a month to every Austrian mother so she can stay home with her children. Workers like him because he defends costly cradle-to-grave benefits against cuts made by the current Government in order to qualify for Europe's single currency, the euro.

Mr. Haider's opponents say his books do not balance -- tax receipts would sink to $30 billion from $40 billion while expenses soar, a Social Democrat spokesman said.

What is baffling is why a far-right party is having such success now.

Austria is not remotely in crisis; economically, it approaches paradise. It has only eight million people -- about as many as desperate Zimbabwe -- but they produce enough to have a higher standard of living than the Germans. Unemployment is 4.3 percent; inflation is negligible. No one ever strikes. The spotless streets of Vienna and Salzburg brim with culture, and women walk them safely at night.

By some estimates, 10 percent of the population consists of immigrants. Without them, the economy would fibrillate: Polish carpenters build housing, Filipino nurses staff hospitals, Hungarian nannies tend babies.

So why do a quarter of all Austrians believe Mr. Haider's assertions that the country is going to the dogs?

Not surprisingly in a nation that has Sigmund Freud, a native son, on its equivalent of the $5 bill, there is no shortage of analysis.

''It's fatigue -- Austrians are complainers,'' said Hans Rauscher, a political columnist for the newspaper Der Standard. After 13 years of the same Government, and almost 30 years under Socialist Chancellors, ''People are really fed up with the same faces in power.''

The reds have dominated Parliament for three decades, and Mr. Haider plays on old resentment over the careful red/black control of daily life. For decades, anyone seeking a civil service job, even as a teacher, bank teller, postman, railway porter or street sweeper, usually had to first join one of the two governing parties.

Austrians are also apprehensive. During the cold war, this was a neutral island in the Alps. Now, hard by the crisis in the countries that once were part of the larger Yugoslavia, it is debating joining NATO and would be the doorsill for Eastern European countries if the European Union's door opens to them.

Mr. Haider takes these jitters and weaves an earthquake, saying child molesters are buying their way out of jail and foreigners have turned the country into ''a center for international crime -- drug dealers, car thieves, pimps and bandits.'' His crime slogan: ''No mercy.''

Hyperbole, even inflated to absurdity, does not backfire on him as Hitlerism does. Opposing the entry into the European Union four years ago, he said Austrians would be forced to pump their bracing water to Spain and import lice-infested yogurt. The yogurt is still good; and he still draws crowds. His railing against immigration actually changed policy. The Government slowed it to a trickle.

Meanwhile, as he fans xenophobia, the ruling parties bicker and run dull ads.

The first black campaign blitz was a folk song book. ''This is not still the country of the von Trapp singers,'' sneered a red spokesman.

Chancellor Viktor Klima of the reds has said he will ''never, never'' form a coalition with Mr. Haider, so his party is hoping the black leader, Wolfgang Schussel, will either change his mind or even be ousted by someone less willing to give up ruling for soul-searching. But Mr. Haider is still the one who makes every other politician angry or nervous.

''The only guy who speaks out, who wants to change anything, is Haider,'' said Georg Hoffman-Ostenhof, a columnist for the Profil weekly. ''And since he's so eclectic and voters are generally not rational, they find him attractive.''

Photo: Polls predict that the far-right Freedom Party, led by Jorg Haider, will do well enough in today's election to become Austria's No. 2 party. (Associated Press)